Tis the Season...

My Google countdown timer shows that, at the moment, it's just more than 4 1/2 days until Christmas, which is my favourite time of year. It's hot and sunny (although really windy in Cape Town), and unless you have air-conditioning, you generally feel kind of sticky, but it's okay, because everyone else feels the same. You eat and drink too much, but that's pretty normal for me, and your skin feels tingly all the time because you're A) sweating, B) sunburnt, or C) both A and B.

Apart from the all-round awesomeness of Summer, Christmas time is just really fun. You meet up with people who you never see on any of the other 364 days of the year. Family members that you usually can't tolerate are nicer because they buy you great gifts. (Thankfully, I get along pretty well with my family, regardless of gift buying skill :) ) You see friends at church on Christmas morning, who are never there on any of the other 51 Sundays of the year. If you're not at the malls, fighting through the masses of annoying shoppers with their 6 children per family all screaming and crying for toys and sweets, life's pretty awesome around Christmas.

I've been staying in Cape Town for the past week, instead of my usual hometown of Bellville. My girlfriend and I are looking after a friend's place and cat while she is away on holiday. It's a nice change from home. We have a partially obstructed view of Table Mountain and are in walking distance of some pretty good restaurants. We've been getting up later than normal and playing stacks of Lego Star Wars on the PC. In other words, living the dream! Hehe!

On the band front, pre-production is in phase 2. We've selected the songs for the new album and are now putting them together with proper lyrics and getting all the parts perfect, so we don't have to do too many retakes in studio.

Here's a sample of some of the demos that we've been working on:

I haven't been listening to all that much new music at the moment, mostly shuffling my music library and listening to whatever my media player decides on. However, I have been listening to Taking Back Sunday's Live from Orensanz album, which is an awesome live acoustic show.

Since I highly doubt I'll even be near a PC, let alone online, on Christmas day, I'm going to wish everyone a Merry Christmas now. I hope it's a great one for you all! :)

Pre-production update

For the past couple of weeks, we've been locked up in our home studio working on pre-production for our new album. In between regular rehearsals for shows, we've been writing new material and making the roughest of rough recordings on our cellphones. After racking up a fair amount of ideas, we're now refining the ideas and formulating and recording some actual songs using actual recording equipment as the first phase of pre-production. I decided to get all artistic and take photos of the studio setup, but upon taking out the camera the other night, I realised that I had left the batteries charging at home.

Enter the infamous cellphone camera... (Please, no comments on the poor focus of some of these photos. I did the best with what I had!)

I discovered the other day that my phone's camera has a macro function. I also discovered how cool my snare drum mic looks when photographed with the macro function! :)

At least 1/4 of each session is spent deciphering horribly distorted recordings taken from Mark's iPhone. Here's a photo of the rest of the guys deep in discussion as to what chords they were playing on the rough recording.

 Typical studio photo. I couldn't resist...

My corner of fun. Complete with bongo drums and a tambourine! 

Three essential components to any studio setup - Working batteries for anything that requires batteries, spare cables for when you trip over the current ones and break them along with your legs, and masking tape for temporarily fixing broken equipment until you can find duct tape to permanently fix it.

If you could read waveforms, you'd know how much this song rocks... :p

About 1/3 of my drum kit. I like drums. Can you tell?

We still have a few more ideas to run through and record before we enter stage 2, which is reviewing the tracks again and actually constructing songs that don't involve us singing "nah, nah, blah, blah, doo bee doo" because we don't have any lyrics yet.

Hopefully my next update will include a few sound clips of what we've done so far. For now, adios amigos!